A young literature student notices two boys noticing her. They will become important parts of each other's lives, teaching each other about the power of love and words, in Lily King's latest beautiful novel, Heart the Lover.
Jordan, as her new friends dub her, wants to learn about everything. She, Sam and Yash are soon inseparable. Jordan and Sam, who feels guilty about sex because of his Baptist upbringing, pair up. But it's her friendship with Yash that sparkles. Their joy at bring together, talking and cooking and just being, is palpable.
When the inevitable happens, Jordan and Sam have already broken up. But she and Yash keep their deeper relationship a secret from Sam, with Yash not wanting to lose his friendship and Jordan not wanting to feel more guilty than she already does. After graduation, Jordan goes to work in Paris. She and Yash dream of relocating there together.
This is the first third of the novel, which ends with heartbreaking information. The middle section begins years later, with Jordan's current life. It has been a happy existence except for the illness of one of her two young sons. An operation may save him; they are on the waiting list.
Then her past comes calling.
When Jordan reunites with the boys, now men, who loved her, King is particularly good at depicting both the depth with which they all know and forgive each other, and the emotions that surface when seeing each other again.
The final third brings together the past and present, with love and forgiveness in their varying forms shining.
And the final page ties this novel to an earlier one (spoilers abound online but I'll avoid them just in case, because finding out is such a pleasure).
Heart the Lover, named after a card in a game the trio played often in college, has several strengths. One is the way it easily shines in describing undergraduate days, which strong friendships are made and everything seems incredibly important. The ebb and flow of days around classes and deadlines to hand in papers, the change in seasons, the long days and short nights, are vividly displayed.
So are a few discussions about ideas and ideals that come up while they discuss literature. These lightly bring in the reader and engage without overwhelming. They are exhilarating.
King also does a lovely job of bringing to life what it's like as an actual adult with a beloved family, chores and obligations, dreams come true and nightmares to face. Heart the Lover is about fully lived lives. It is a treasure.
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A selection of this week's new fiction, with links to The Literate Lizard and descriptions by the publishers.
The London suburb of Croydon, 1964: Helen Hansford is unmarried and in her thirties. Something of a disappointment to her middle-class parents, she’s an art therapist at the Westbury Park psychiatric hospital, where she has been having a rebellious love affair with her colleague Gil, a dashing but married doctor.
One spring afternoon they receive a call about a disturbance at a derelict, vine-covered Victorian house a few miles up the road. There the police find a mute, thirty-seven-year-old man called William Tapping, his hair and beard down to his waist. It appears he lives in the old house with his elderly, frail aunt, who expires as soon as she’s admitted to the hospital. No one knows why William has been shut away for decades, unseen by neighbors, with only his two now-deceased aunts for company.
To celebrate her upcoming birthday, a woman announces she will hold a swayamvar—a custom in her native Indian culture from ancient times in which suitors compete in a feat of wills and strength to win the hand of a beautiful princess. A respected intellectual living in Seattle, the twice-divorced woman once declared that she was “past such petty matters as love,” but her overwhelming need to bolster her self-esteem and satisfy her sexual libido can no longer be denied.
In doing something so romantically whimsical, she prepares herself to be laughed at by her friends, neighbors, and colleagues. Yet, to her surprise, she receives support from a circle of ardent admirers, including a wedding planner looking for the next enchanting thing, a disability rights activist making a documentary film, and even, her reluctant adult son. She also faces unexpected detractors—the Men's Rights Movement, angry at her objectification of men, protest the project. And there are visits from goddesses and princesses past who both try to stop her and cheer her on. She must also reckon with her family’s past and the terrible curse on those members who show an intemperance of spirit.
- Sea Now by Eva Meijer, translated by Anne Thompson Melo
The catastrophe that everyone knew was coming has arrived—the dikes are breached, the tideline rises a kilometer a day, and the citizens of the Netherlands are forced into gyms and shelters in Germany and Belgium. The foxes and rabbits head inland across the dunes. The politicians make empty speeches and fret the optics. The Hague—“the center of peace and justice”—slips beneath the rising water. Online retailers do flash sale promotions on disaster kits. There is violence and looting, but some people are too tired to start over again and simply walk into the rising tide.
Not willing to simply move on, three women get into a small boat and ride back out over the flooded cities, looking for loved ones they know are likely drowned. On the way, they witness a world retaken by seabirds, whales, and kelp forests. The sea has spoken, and there’s nothing left to be done but listen.
- Art on Fire by Yun Ko-eun, translated by Lizzie Buehler
An Yiji’s career had been stalling for some time when a representative of the illustrious Robert Foundation offers her a spot on their all-expenses-paid artist residency in California. The residency has launched many famous artists’ careers, so she knows she can’t waste this opportunity. Still, she feels reluctant to accept, and with good reason: the Foundation’s patron is a small dog named Robert, known for both his talent as a photographer, but also his arrogance. Moreover, the offer comes with a condition: on the last day of the residency, one of An’s paintings must be incinerated, and Robert gets to select which one.
A young boy and his older sisters find themselves suddenly and utterly alone, orphaned in an abandoned fishing village. Their food supplies dwindling, they set out across a breathtaking yet treacherous wilderness in search of the last of their people.
Down the coast, raiders deliver the children's mother, along with the rest of their human cargo, to the last port city of a waning empire. Determined to reunite with her family, she plots her escape—while her fellow captives plan open revolt.
At the center of power in this crumbling city, a young scholar inherits his father's business and position of privilege, along with the burden of his debts. As the empire's elite prepare to flee to new utopia across the sea, he must decide where his allegiance lies.
With a rapidly changing climate shifting the sands beneath their feet, these three paths converge in a struggle for the future of humanity—who will inherit what remains and who gets to tell its story.
Harmonia Rosales retells the African myths ... the powerful, temperamental deities called the Orishas; of the founding of Yorubaland by the shrewd leader Oduduwa; of the young heroine Eve, born in a time of violence and despair, who would help her people regain their past splendor; and of shimmering serpents and monstrous shadows who stalk the lands of mortals. At the center of these linked tales is the bond, sometimes fraying, between the Orishas and the humans who worship them. It was the Orishas who made humans, and who gave them their most precious resource: their Oris, or destinies.
In these nine peerless stories, a family boating trip veers into emotional disaster while very narrowly avoiding the physical; a would-be cheater hands over his car—his prized possession—for a shot with a pretty girl; a furniture magnate and his filmmaker daughter visit his impoverished hometown; a doctor’s long-ago affair returns with a bitter pill. Crackling with wry humor, shot through with both wisdom and pain, these are stories of grifters and dreamers, of the lovelorn and the lawless, stories of the ongoing dissonance between the lives we want and the lives this world will allow.
In Spencer’s fantasies, the breezy, queer streets of Provincetown, MA, are utopia, a place where he can be free. Yet when a violent attack in his suburban Arizona schoolyard sends him to the hospital, he decides queer utopia can’t wait. And one night, with the help of his best friend, the teenage witch Joy, he hitches a ride to find it.
The cross-country road odyssey that follows brings Spencer from new moon rituals in Arizona canyons to Texas bus stations, from the luxe drag stages of Houston’s Montrose district to the jazz-soaked streets of the French Quarter and beyond.
- Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumoto, translated by Jesse Kirkwood (Translated by), Introduction by Amor Towles
In a rocky cove in the bay of Hakata, the bodies of a young and beautiful couple are discovered. Standing on the cold beach, the police see nothing to investigate: the flush of the couple's cheeks and the empty juice bottle speak clearly of cyanide, of a lovers' suicide. But in the eyes of two men, Torigai Jutaro, a senior detective, and Kiichi Mihara, a young gun from Tokyo, something is not quite right. Together, they begin to pick at the knot of a unique and calculated crime.
Now widely available in English for the first time.
In thirteenth-century Ireland, a woman with power is a woman to be feared.
Alice, the daughter of a wealthy innkeeper in Kilkenny, grows up watching her mother wither under the constraints of family responsibilities—and she vows that she will never suffer the same fate. In time, she discovers she has a flair for making money, and takes her father's flourishing business to new heights. But as her riches and stature grow, so too do rumors about her private life. By the time she marries her fourth husband—the three earlier are dead—a storm of local gossip and resentment culminates in a life-threatening accusation.
At the turn of the millennium, editorial assistant Clodagh “Clo” Harmon wants nothing more than to rise through the ranks at the world’s most prestigious fashion magazine. There’s just one problem: She doesn’t have the right pedigree. Instead, Clo is a “workhorse” surrounded by beautiful, wealthy, impossibly well-connected “show horses” who get ahead without effort, including her beguiling cubicle-mate, Davis Lawrence, the daughter of a beloved but fading Broadway actress. Harry Wood, Davis’s boarding school classmate and a reporter with visions of his own media empire, might be Clo’s ally in gaming the system—or he might be the only thing standing between Clo and her rightful place at the top.
Striker isn’t entirely sure she should be on this luxury Antarctic cruise. A Black film scout, her mission is to photograph potential locations for a big-budget movie about Ernest Shackleton’s doomed expedition. Along the way, she finds private if cautious amusement in the behavior of both the native wildlife and the group of wealthy, mostly white tourists who have chosen to spend Christmas on the Weddell Sea.
But when a kayaking excursion goes horribly wrong, Striker and a group of survivors become stranded on a remote island along the Antarctic Peninsula, a desolate setting complete with boiling geothermal vents and vicious birds. Soon the hostile environment will show each survivor their true face, and as the polar ice thaws in the unseasonable warmth, the group’s secrets, prejudices, and inner demons will also emerge, including revelations from Striker’s past that could irrevocably shatter her world.
Based on the author's true story that went viral and was discovered by the editor of the three-million copy bestseller Before the Coffee Gets Cold, a charming tale translated from Japanese about a woman who gets over a break up by cooking her ex's favorite recipes.
Twenty-nine year old Momoko has been tragically dumped. She thought she and her boyfriend were in love. He even took her to a love hotel, where she thought he was going to propose. Instead, he dumps her.
Momoko does what many broken-hearted people do—she gets incredibly drunk. So drunk, that she passes out in an empty cafe. Eager to tell her story to anyone who will listen, she pours her heart out to a curious manager and the sole other customer in the cafe, a monk who trains at a temple nearby. When she starts to describe how she doted on her boyfriend, how he loved her cooking, the manager decides to indulge her, and allows her to slip into the kitchen, and cook up her ex’s favorite dish: a warm, delightful butter chicken curry. Soon, as Momoko finishes telling her story and as they all eat her dish, she realizes this combination of cooking and sharing has healed her heart in a way nothing else can.
The manager has an idea—what if they started doing this regularly, inviting in patrons to hear stories about breakups, heartbreaks, and tragic endings, and cook up dishes that meant something to the relationship? Like an unconventional therapy group, the “Ex-Boyfriend’s Favorite Recipe Funeral Committee” is formed, with Momoko at the helm.
When a body is found in a bog in northwest England, Agnes, an American forensic anthropologist, is called to investigate. But this body is not like any she’s ever seen. Though its bones prove it was buried more than two thousand years ago, it is almost completely preserved.
Soon Agnes is drawn into a mystery from the distant past, called to understand and avenge the death of an Iron Age woman more like her than she knows. Along the way, she must contend with peat-cutters who want to profit from the bog and activists who demand that the land be left undisturbed. Then there’s the moss itself: a complex repository of artifacts and remains, with its own dark stories to tell.
A newcomer to New York, Wyeth is a Black painter who grew up in the South and is trying to find his place in the contemporary Manhattan art scene. It’s challenging. Gallery shows displaying bad art. Pretentious artists jockeying for attention. The gossip and the backstabbing. While his part-time work for an art restorer is engaging, Wyeth suffers from artist’s block with his painting and he is finding it increasingly difficult to spark his creativity. When he meets Keating, a white former seminarian who left the priesthood, Wyeth begins to reconsider how to observe the world, in the process facing questions about the conflicts between Black and white art, the white gaze on the Black body, and the compromises we make – in art and in life.
In a near-future Kolkata beset by flooding and famine, Ma, her two-year-old daughter, and her elderly father are just days from leaving the collapsing city behind to join Ma’s husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After procuring long-awaited visas from the consulate, they pack their bags for the flight to America. But in the morning they awaken to discover that Ma’s purse, containing their treasured immigration documents, has been stolen.
Set over the course of one week, A Guardian and a Thief tells two stories: the story of Ma’s frantic search for the thief while keeping hunger at bay during a worsening food shortage; and the story of Boomba, the thief, whose desperation to care for his family drives him to commit a series of escalating crimes whose consequences he cannot fathom.
Set in Taiwan and the Silicon Valley, a collection of linked stories that explore the meaning of success and the purpose of existence, centered on the short life and long shadow of an engineering genius who descends deeper into despair while rising higher on the professional ladder.
The hard-working geniuses of Spent Bullets are the crème de la crème of the meritocracy. Educated in the best schools in Taiwan, they move to lucrative positions in America’s big tech, reaching the pinnacle of career prestige. Yet there is a dark side to their relentless focus and achievements.
For fans of George Saunders and Haruki Murakami, Christian Moody delivers his debut speculative short story collection, Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds––tales of the strange beauty and shadowy fears that lurk beneath the surface of our everyday lives
Best friends George and Elly start a hide-and-go-seek club inspired by their love of the game, which goes too far when Elly stays hidden for years. An orphan discovers that the trees on the outskirts of town have eyes that watch and record the town’s inhabitants, threatening to expose their most vulnerable secrets. In a world with hardly any birds left, a struggling family lives alone in the woods, where the father begins to create mechanical birds which threaten the only life left. And a man working at a futuristic egg factory spots an anomaly in one of the eggs, which, along with the fact that his wife and daughter spontaneously get pregnant at the same time, sparks his journey to uncover the company’s secrets.
The extraordinary folktales collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe began appearing in Norway in 1841. Over the next two decades the publication of subsequent editions under the title Norske folkeeventyr made the names Asbjørnsen and Moe synonymous with Norwegian storytelling traditions. Tiina Nunnally’s vivid translation of their monumental collection is the first new English translation in more than 150 years—and the first ever to include all sixty original tales.
Magic and myth inhabit these pages in figures both familiar and strange. Giant trolls and talking animals are everywhere. The winds take human form. A one-eyed old woman might seem reminiscent of the Norse god Odin. We meet sly aunts, resourceful princesses, and devious robbers. The clever and fearless boy Ash Lad often takes center stage as he ingeniously breaks spells and defeats enemies to win half the kingdom. These stories, set in Norway’s majestic landscape of towering mountains and dense forests, are filled with humor, mischief, and sometimes surprisingly cruel twists of fate.
Set in London across a single, life-altering summer, Curtis Garner's debut novel, Isaac, is a queer story for our digital age, offering new perspectives on desire and intimacy, adolescent obsession, and dangerous first love.
Isaac is an inexperienced gay youth whose first sexual encounter via a dating app is disappointing, yet thrillingly addictive. He spends his final months before university escaping into a dizzying new world of casual sex, but his world changes when he meets twenty-eight-year-old Harrison at a party.
Everyone knows Marina, the A-list movie star. But very few know Marina, the absolute monster. Years at the top have proved that whatever Marina wants, she gets. But when she meets bartender Anna, Marina discovers something that can’t be bought: Anna’s affection. As Anna remains unmoved, Marina’s advances become more desperate, and her obsession more dangerous.
A doctor-patient love affair goes awry in this near-future dystopian novel, the first by the award-winning Hungarian writer to be translated into English.
Eye of the Monkey begins in the wake of a devastating civil war that led to the formation of the United Regency, an autocracy in an unnamed European country. The ravages of war are sweeping, and the populace has been divided into segregated zones, where the well-off are under mass surveillance and the poor are phantom presences, confined and ghettoized.
On the verge of a nervous breakdown after being followed by a young man for weeks, Giselle, a history professor at the New University, seeks the help of Dr. Mihály Kreutzer, a psychiatrist who is navigating divorce and the recent death of his mother. They soon begin a torrid love affair, but everything is not what it seems. As Giselle begins to unpack her family history and the possible root of her psychological crisis, Dr. Kreutzer, who has ties to some of the most powerful people in the country, possesses ulterior motives of his own.
Estranged from his elderly, senile father, Daniel nonetheless returns to South Africa to care for him during his final months. Shortly after arriving in Cape Town, however, Daniel learns of an unusual clause in the old man’s will: he will inherit his share of his father’s estate only if he spends time with Theon, a cousin whom he hasn’t seen since they were boys, and who lives on a sprawling farm in the Free State. With the conditions bearing on Daniel’s inheritance shifting in real time, Theon and Daniel travel to Japan to seek out an experimental cure for the son of the woman Theon lives with. The trip will change their lives forever.
- Unfit by Ariana Harwicz, translated by Jessie Mendez Sayer
Lisa has lost custody of her young twin boys. Caught between the French legal system’s sluggish bureaucracy and her sinister, scheming in-laws, she’s alone and lost, an Argentine migrant in rural France picking grapes for a pittance, only allowed to see her children in supervised visits once a month. Scapegoated and outcast, destitute and desperate, Lisa decides to take radical action: early one morning, she sneaks into her in-laws’ farmhouse, takes back her children, sets the barn ablaze, and makes her escape. What follows is a white-knuckled road trip that explores human beings pushed to the edge.
Clearly, Lisa is not in her right mind, and as Harwicz deftly mingles a chorus of contradictory voices into her very unreliable narration, the reader comes to regard the protagonist with an unsettling mixture of sympathy and suspicion.
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